"Today, the GNOME Project celebrates the release of GNOME 3.6, the latest version of the popular free desktop, as well as the GNOME developer platform. GNOME 3.6 is the third major update of GNOME 3. It builds on the foundations that we have laid with the previous 3.x releases and offers a greatly enhanced experience. The exciting new features and improvements in this release include a new login experience, integrated input methods, a refresh of the message tray, support for more online accounts, improved accessibility, and many more."

In Operations Management there is a certain notion that the technology should always have a visual and intuitive features. Now if you understand this concept well, you will figure out why the Linux Desktop keeps failing through projects like GNOME 3. People should intuitively know how to use it and adapt fast to it. Notice that even though Windows 95 had a long way until the birth of Windows 7, it did keep its essence, visually and intuitively.

Now GNOME 3 reaches version 3.6 and I get that nothing major has changed. There are some cool features, but my workflow is quite the same: unproductive. One of the designers behind the concept (a Red Hat worker) told the internet that GNOME 3 is for people who "fit it". Among other things, he also told that "the opponents of GNOME 3 were the same people who were dissatisfied with GNOME 2 after its release". I am sorry? How is that? How does he know for a fact that these are the same people? I think this guy should be questioned why he thinks the analogy of GNOME 1 towards 2 reflects anything similar as in GNOME 2 towards 3. Let me tell you something: this software designer understands NOTHING, absolutely NOTHING about computing productivity. Using GNOME 3 is unproductive. Changing applications is annoying. Finding stuff is time consuming. Going to "Activities" is more than time consuming.

I'm sorry but I need to quote Dedoimedo now: "On the other hand, the self-professed philosophy of idiocy that guides Gnome 3 remains completely unchanged. The desktop is empty, bland, boring. The Activity panel is so difficult to access and use. The contrast and sharpness of icons and fonts is appalling. The GUI dynamics are equivalent to slamming a door on your gonads. All in all, it remains probably the least efficient, least user-friendly framework ever developed, being even worse than Windows 8, IceWM and Scrotwm combined."

Dedo just said something that is the exact size and magnitude of what GNOME 3 really is: The worse ever made user interface. And I know he's not going on about just visuals, but production. It's because of GNOME 3 that Fedora is losing more and more ground. It's because of Unity that Ubuntu just started to dig its grave. These "software leaders" who made "brave decisions" on how users should "interact with their computer", just don't know how to conciliate production environment with user interfaces. So GNOME 3 and Unity remain those silly dream toys. The community is the real loser. Red Hat will be losing. I know people who operates RHEL don't give a damn about a GUI, but I also know people who operates RHEL completely on top of the GUI. It's even funny to think of a company like Red Hat be supporting design decisions like GNOME 3, even more coming from employees. Any production manager would fire away all these people, straight away. But when the money runs short, heads will roll. Gnomes' heads mainly.

We used to have a major popular desktop - Gnome 2 that was seen by all new Linux users. It wasn't perfect but it was adequate and it became a de-facto standard Linux desktop. That standardization was perhaps its biggest achievement.

We know what happened later. The desktop has been abandoned by its developers. Worse, by making Gnome 3 explicitly incompatible with Gnome 2 they have effectively killed the latter. Yes, there is Mate but (1) it no longer has the support Gnome 2 enjoyed, (2) it is 3 years behind in development (2 years for development of Gnome 3 plus 1 year for renaming all components so that they don't clash with Gnome 3).

Yes, we can say we still have Xfce (I've been using it even in Gnome 2 days because in many was it was better than it), Mate, Cinnamon, KDE, LXDE, E17 and, yes, Gnome 3 and Unity. But we no longer have that ecosystem Gnome 2 was.

To put it in words that those who've been around the Alternate operating Systems scene a while would understand, Canonical's "Unity" is the equivalent of Be's infamous "focus shift" shortly before it went under.

Worse actually, because their Gnome 2.xx desktop was becoming the standard Linux desktop for many users and their "focus shift" has led to them sacrificing existing users in exchange for potential users.